
A beautiful sunset on the holiday island of Koh Samet
Living upcountry in Thailand, X’mas was just another day and I didn’t indulge in any merry festivities, which anyway, were not…..happening around town. In fact, I think the closest I got to a feel of X’mas was being served by a couple of naughty looking Beer Singha Promotion girls dressed-up in some short kinky Santa Clause outfit at the Beer Garden just down the road.
The Thais may not exactly celebrate X’mas that much, but New Year (1st Jan) is another splendid time of the year for the locals to throw a wild party. Great country this is, Thailand! Just import lots of other national holidays and celebrate them too! Halloween? Valentines? X’mas? Chinese New Year? Bring them all in, wonderful excuse to have a mad party, get drunk and gamble on cards every month! And you wonder why I don’t go back to England!
The response so far to my own top ten has been pretty decent and I’m delighted that some of the readers have taken time and wandered back to look at some of me older stuff. So here it is, my own final… top three blogs of the year:
And I am not joking! You be may wondering how I had the darned nerve to stick this in the top three – well that’s pretty easy to answer. A lotta unique viewers get through to thai-blogs every day through search engines and definitely Google. If you thought that key-words for finding ‘stevesuphan’s blogs’ were in the form of ‘Teaching in Thailand’, ‘Getting Married in Thailand’ or ‘Saucy Thai singers’ then I am afraid to inform you – NO! You would be amazed to the amount of readers we get coming here everyday looking for info on ‘Thai Ladyboys’.
Search phrases along the lines of ‘Ladyboy’ probably outrank even those other two hits of mine along the lines of ‘Dos and Don’t’s/ Thailand’ and ‘Thai girls’. On top of this, a myriad of readers latched on to this blog of mine and sent it whizzing around to other blogsites. It was the first ‘actual proper’ blog of mine that really punched readership power. Love it or hate it, it tells a variety of witty stories about the one and only…..Thai Ladyboy. Even a couple of serious points were mentioned too, to even things up. I think the blog offers good insight for newbie foreigners interested in Thai Ladyboys. It is a fun blog and not to be taken seriously!
This blog told of the horrifying ghastly saga of an extremely hunfortunate Hungarian going by the name of….Mr Tammas. From just needing to pop over the Cambodian border to renew his Thai visa, the poor fellow very soon had his passport, credit cards and cash stolen by a heartless razor-sharp thief. Money and passportless, Mr Tammas is soon stuck behind bars in a Khmer cell with a thousand cockroaches and smelly inmates for company. Finally arriving in Phnom Penh, he was bitterly aghast at the lack of diplomatic relations with the former east-bloc country and left to clean the floors and make ghoulash at one of the capital’s lousiest guesthouses.
Now, how the heck did this shortish blog managed to reach number two in a list of 50+ blogs? The answer? – word of mouth. Just a few weeks after that blog I went and joined up with a few of the ex-pat community here in Suphanburi only to here the likes of “Hey man, that was one gruesome story about that Hungarian guy, our Dutch friend had to go to Poipet for his visa run yesterday and was petrified!”. Geez, the sunfortunate saga of Mr Tammas had spread! Another Farang from Angthong had given all his Farang buddies in that province the awful lowdown on the fate of Mr Tammas! And if that wasn’t enough, I was at my favourite bar/restaurant ‘DDM2’, a Korean gaff located near the National Gallery one day and bumped into an English backpacker who had read a couple of my blogs. The backpacker asked “Do you know whatever happened to that hunfortunate Hungarian who had his passport nicked in Cambodia?” He went on to tell me that he had spread the story like wildfire at the beach resort he was staying at in Koh Phang-ngan! How many others spread the story story of the hapless Hungarian….i just do not know
Of course, Mr Tammas – never existed, I completely made the story up.
Having lived in Cambodia, I heard a variety of different stories about – being banged up in a Khmer cell, lack of diplomatic relationship, passports stolen and corrupt officials. And too right, there was a down-and-out Bahtless Farang working as a cleaner, tout and cook at this guesthouse I was staying at for a while! Stevesuphan’s nastiest wind-up of the year and fortunately….the only one!
1) Dos and don’ts of dating…. a ‘proper’ Thai girl
Without a doubt my top blog of the year. It didn’t just lead me to blogging for thai-blogs in the first place but it set a precendent for future Dos and Don’ts/Thailand blogs. Even though the blog never did make the main page here at thai-blogs, it caught the attention of various other bloggers who thought the blog was decent enough for them to post themselves. Permission sought or not. Due to referers, the blog still brings in unique visitors til this day. At the forums here, it also ended up as one of the most popular threads of the year.
The response to this blog from folks around the world and especially Thai readers was postively and completely unexpected. Received a host of comments and even e-mails from Thai girls and some Farang guys thanking me for the advice and my appreciation of ‘proper’ Thai girls. Ironically, the only negative feedback I got was from a couple of Farang guys who informed me to the likes of…“I don’t need your advice on how to date a Thai girl, if she doesn’t like me for who I am then she can bugger off!” In fact a lot of the support for this blog from Thai girls read exactly like……this kind of attitude.
‘Dos and don’ts of dating a Farang Guy’ is also one of my most read blogs, and is a witty but slightly serious insight into how us Farang men are seen through the eyes of a Thai girl. Not just Farang-bashing, I served up a bit of revenge in ‘Dos and don’ts for Thais going to Farangland’
Sees yous all soon after the hols….
AND HAVE A DARNED-….. HAPPY NEW YEAR!